Critic's Choice: New DVD's

By Dave Kehr

Published: April 18, 2006

The Complete Mr. Arkadin
The title of this important three-disc set from the Criterion Collection is already a reflection of wishful thinking. There is no ''complete'' version of ''Mr. Arkadin,'' the film that Orson Welles labored over for much of 1954, for the simple reason that ''Mr. Arkadin'' was never completed. In 1955, after Welles had missed a Christmas deadline for a final cut, the producer, Louis Dolivet, took the film away from him and released his own version, retitled ''Confidential Report,'' in 1956.

If there is no single ''Mr. Arkadin,'' there are many different cuts that were released in different countries at different times. The Criterion set presents two, Mr. Dolivet's release version of 1956 as well as an earlier cut, which Welles scholars, including Peter Bogdanovich and Jonathan Rosenbaum, believe to be closer to Welles's intentions. Mr. Bogdanovich discovered it in the vaults of an American television syndication company in 1960.

And the Criterion set adds yet another version, a ''comprehensive'' one, assembled by the archivists Stefan Dr?er and Claude Bartemes, that conforms to Welles's wishes as much as they are known. It uses the best existing print sources with added shots and sequences from the other versions, including two distinct Spanish-language cuts issued by the Spanish co-producer.

Not content with that, Criterion has tossed in both the film's rough draft, which took the form of three episodes of a radio show, ''The Lives of Harry Lime,'' that Welles wrote and starred in, as well as the 245-page novelization of ''Mr. Arkadin,'' originally published under Welles's name. (Most scholars now accept it as the work of Maurice Bessy, a Welles collaborator and critic.)

It's a captivating package, even if the film or films don't belong to the first rank of Welles's work. ''Mr. Arkadin'' remains a strange, magpie movie, assembled from elements lifted from past films Welles had worked on or been near. The plot, with the complex flashback structure suppressed by Mr. Dolivet and now restored, looks like a pulp writer's parody of ''Citizen Kane'': an investigator searches for the truth about a shady, powerful international businessman (played, with a putty nose and a plainly pasted-on beard, by Welles).

The investigator, a na? American (Robert Arden), who supposedly makes his living as a sailor, is a borrowing of the na? sailor Welles played in ''The Lady From Shanghai'' (1947); the businessman, with his network of dubious interests in postwar Europe, carries a big imprint of ''The Third Man,'' in which Welles had starred for Carol Reed (1949); and there is even a carnival scene that appears to imitate the spectacular finale of ''Gilda'' (1946), which starred Rita Hayworth, who was then married to Welles.

Is ''Mr. Arkadin'' a brilliant piece of prepostmodernist ''appropriation,'' recycling past achievements into a Wellesian meta-movie? Or is it just a mess, reflecting the difficulty Welles was experiencing as he tried to restart his failed American career in Europe?

Compelling arguments can be made either way, and many are in the course of the documentation that comes with the discs, which includes essays by the critic J. Hoberman, the French Welles scholar Fran?s Thomas (who prefers ''Confidential Report'' for its polished sound mix) and Mr. Rosenbaum, as well as an audio commentary by Mr. Rosenbaum and another American Wellesian, James Naremore. What is indisputable is that the film has never looked better than it does in this painstaking restoration. For those of us in the United States who have known ''Mr. Arkadin'' largely through a fuzzy, pirated edition, that is revelation enough. $49.95, not rated.

A Bigger Splash

When Jack Hazan's ''Bigger Splash'' had its premiere at the New York Film Festival in 1974, the New York Times film critic Vincent Canby elegantly danced around the film's most distinguishing feature: ostensibly a documentary about the life of the British Pop artist David Hockney, ''A Bigger Splash'' was also one of the most open and explicit portraits of gay life to appear up to that time (at least in the mainstream cinema).

Mr. Hockney is shown struggling over a gigantic painting -- one of the poolside series he conceived in Southern California -- while his relationship with the painting's principal model, Peter Schlesinger, is coming to an end after five years. For many audiences, ''A Bigger Splash'' afforded the first look at gay life that was neither pornographic nor exploitative, though it was still surpassingly chic, thanks to Mr. Hockney's unshakable sense of personal style and the careful consideration of lighting and framing that Mr. Hazan brought to his (largely staged) material.

What the film has lost in political impact in the last 32 years, it has gained in value as a time capsule. Here is Swinging London (and New York and Los Angeles) in its dandyish, gaudy glory, and even scenes that appeared to stop the film cold on its first release -- an extended fashion show, devoted to the 70's work of Ossie Clark -- now bristle with interest and historical detail. This excellent transfer from First Run Features comes with deeply saturated tropical colors of which, you can safely assume, Mr. Hockney would approve. $24.95, not rated.

The Chess Players

By 1977, the Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray had left Bengal, and the brilliant neo-realist films he made there (including his justly famous ''Apu Trilogy''), to try his luck in the more commercial Hindi cinema, with its attendant bigger budgets. The result was ''The Chess Players,'' Ray's first historical epic and a surprisingly adventurous film, one that breaks with the naturalism of his early work and imposes an explicitly allegorical structure.

The screenplay, based on a famous novel by the Hindi writer Munshi Premchand, cuts between two games of chess, one literal -- a continuing contest between two oblivious local aristocrats (Saeed Jaffrey and Sanjeev Kumar) -- and one figurative, a higher-stakes contest that pits the passive aesthete (Amjad Khan) who is the king of the rich, independent province of Oudh, against the British officer (Richard Attenborough) who hopes to take over the kingdom for the British East India company.

Ray employs a whole range of techniques that are new to his work, from essayistic interjections from a narrator who explains the political background to the highly satirical treatment of the two self-absorbed aristocrats, who seem barely to notice as their land and culture are gobbled up by the colonial interlopers. A very impressive film, marred by a transfer that crops the left and right sides of the image. (Kino on Video, $29.95, not rated).

Also Out Today

HOSTEL -- Eli Roth's horror film follows three American tourists to a Slovakian youth hostel, which turns out to be a front for something more sinister. Sony, $28.95, R.

BREAKFAST ON PLUTO -- Neil Jordan (''The Crying Game'') films the story of a young man from provincial Ireland (Cillian Murphy), who becomes a star in London's transvestite cabaret scene in the 1970's. Sony, $24.96, R.

Photos: Orson Welles as a shady businessman in ''Mr. Arkadin''; right, the painter David Hockney, at left, and the art curator Henry Geldzahler in the 1974 documentary ''A Bigger Splash.'' (Photo by Criterion Collection); (Photo by First Run Features)